No matter how much we dream of children who love each other and are each other's best friends, siblings fight – a lot. Any people who share living space will rub one another up, but most parents find siblings argue roughly 200 million times more often than your standard couples, housemates or prison inmates. Whether or not they have a natural fondness for each other, siblings share their parents, a home life and the closest possible genetic bond, and because so much is the same for siblings, much about their relationship is about learning to separate.
“The British psychoanalyst Juliet Mitchell suggested the idea of being displaced by a sibling was in the mind of every child,” says Johannesburg counselling psychologist Jade Paterson. “Siblings can be rivals for the
